System for determining final position of teeth

A computer program for use in a system for defining a fit between a set of upper and lower teeth in a masticatory system of a patient and planning orthodontic treatment, the computer program residing on a computer-readable storage medium and comprising instructions operable to cause a programmable processor to:

• determine an occlusion from a computer model of a set of upper and lower teeth of a patient's teeth;
• model the set of teeth in a plurality of different arrangements representing successive repositioning of the patient's teeth from a first arrangement toward a desired arrangement;
• and
• model a patient removable appliance for each of a plurality of the arrangements, the patient removable appliances having teeth receiving cavities, the cavities of successive appliances having different geometries shaped to receive and resiliently reposition the teeth from one arrangement toward a successive arrangement.

A computer program for use in a system for defining a fit between a set of upper and lower teeth in a masticatory system of a patient and planning orthodontic treatment, the computer program residing on a computer-readable storage medium and comprising instructions operable to cause a programmable processor to:

• determine an occlusion from a first computer representation of the masticatory system of a patient;
• generate a second computer representation of the masticatory system of the patient, the generation comprising optimizing placement of teeth by selecting occlusion index reducing movements to one or more teeth of the first computer representation;
• model the set of teeth in a plurality of different arrangements representing successive repositioning of the patient's teeth from a first arrangement toward a desired arrangement;
• and
• model a patient removable appliance for each of a plurality of the arrangements, the patient removable appliances having teeth receiving cavities, the cavities of successive appliances having different geometries shaped to receive and resiliently reposition the teeth from one arrangement toward a successive arrangement.

A method for defining a fit between a set of upper and lower teeth in a masticatory system of a patient and planning orthodontic treatment, comprising:

• determining an occlusion from a computer representation of the masticatory system;
• digitally modeling the set of teeth in a first plurality of different arrangements representing successive repositioning of the patient's teeth from a first arrangement toward a first desired arrangement;
• generating a patient removable appliance for each of a plurality of the arrangements;
• receiving a digital model of the patient's teeth comprising mid-treatment dental information of the patient;
• and
• digitally modeling a second plurality of different arrangements of the patients based on the mid-treatment dental information, the second plurality representing repositioning of the patient's teeth toward a second desired arrangement.